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Pop songs, sit-coms, Julia Roberts movies, even commercials make it crystal clear that others have it all figured out. Love, sex, money, looks, health, and more—tied up neatly in anywhere from 30 seconds to 90 minutes. Others have it all. So, why has happiness eluded you? Could it be you have the wrong job? The wrong skin color? The wrong body? The wrong attitude? Are you just too stupid and lazy to get it?

Don't you realize all those brave men and women are over there dying so you can be happy? Why are you letting those heroes down? You're not anti-American, are you?

Everyone else lives in a huge, clean, nicely furnished home. If you don't believe me, just turn on your TV and see for yourself. Their kids are attractive and funny. Their mates may have a few minor (humorous) imperfections but that's what makes them just perfect. Their car is shiny and never breaks down. Their pets never shit on the rug. Their bosses respect them. Their friends support them unconditionally. They own all the latest gear, the latest fashions. Their butts are firm, their biceps bulge. They always say the right thing. You, on the other hand, are a complete fuckin' loser.

But there's hope for you, if you're willing to chase it.

The right TV shows, the right clothes, the right car, the right slang, the right diet, the right hairdo, the right consumer electronics, the right behavior: every bit of it can be purchased now…for a limited time only. While supplies last. First come, first served. Buy one, get another at half-price. But make sure you buy, spend, consume, and chase, chase, chase. Happiness is out there. You know it is because you see it every night on your TV screen. It's your turn…unless it's not. Unless you're a complete fuckin' loser.

In that case, you just need to chase harder. Much harder. The most important move you can make is always keep chasing. Happiness is out there. You see it every night on your TV screen. You don't want to be like those people who live in bad neighborhoods with lousy jobs and criminals for kids. They're in that mess because they're too stupid and lazy to chase happiness. They asked for it and got what they deserved. They are complete fuckin' losers. Not you. You have potential…the potential to spend and consume and buy and chase until you're just like all your fabulous friends on TV.

And one more thing: You know all those treehuggers who tell you about the negative impact of your consumption? Fuck them. They are the biggest fuckin' losers of all.

You deserve the best so get out there and chase it…all day long…until your last, dying breath.

If you don't, the terrorists win.

When it comes to true happiness, you're either with us or against us.

(This message was brought to you by your friends in Corporate America…raping the environment and exploiting the non-rich for more than a century.)

Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net

You’d think that people always seeking “lessons” from war would draw one from our latest wonder weapon, which fights our wars for us without an American in sight. I’m talking, of course, about the drone aircraft that have, in recent years, become a signature form of American war-making. They represent truly advanced technology, with ever newer generations of them in production and on the drawing boards, ones that might some distant day be able to fight actual Terminator wars more or less on their own.

The drones already in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and perhaps other zones of conflict are now celebrated in Washington for their special “precision” in taking out enemies. Like all such weapons, however, they look so much more precise to those using them than to those on whom they are being used. They are also only as good as the intelligence that sends the missiles and bombs towards targets on the ground, which means that such weaponry will always, repetitively, kill innocent civilians (and sometimes only them). Don’t be fooled by the stories that invariably describe the latest drone attack as taking out so many “suspected militants.” It ain’t necessarily so.

Our precision weapons look different indeed if you happen to be under them, as the headline of a recent Reuters article makes clear: “Drones spur Yemenis' distrust of government and U.S.” Yes, Virginia, ever since the underwear bomber headed from Yemen Detroit-wards and threw this country into a paroxysm of fear, your advanced weapons systems have been buzzing the skies of that country and evidently firing missiles as well. “Suspected militants” have died, but so have civilians. ("Now children and women are terrified and can't sleep... people are haunted. They expect the next strike to hit the innocent and not the fugitives...") While enemies are certainly being assassinated, enemies -- undoubtedly more of them -- are being created. And as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and TomDispatch regular William Astore points out, Americans know next to nothing about all of this. We are generally as cosseted from our wars -- and the world they are helping to create -- as the pilots who fly such aircraft from Langley, Virginia, or Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, “warriors” whose most dangerous moments are caught in an on-base sign that warns pilots at Creech to “drive carefully” on leaving after a work shift “in” Afghanistan or Iraq. This, it says, is “the most dangerous part of your day.”

There are lessons to be learned from all of this, but not by Americans, not right now anyway. When Astore focuses on how isolated we are from the wars Washington fights in our name, he’s on to something deep and degrading. It should be a lesson to us all. Tom

The New American Isolationism - The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities by William J. Astore

A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war’s horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.

Leaders create
leaders. There are no “people-oriented” proactive leaders at the global theatre
of politics sensitive to humanitarian thinking and actions and striving to make
rational policies and decisions to lead the besieged humanity out of the
man-made catastrophic wars of deaths and destruction engulfed in the 21st
century age of reason. The contemporary world is coerced to egoistic political governance
by the wrong people, with wrong thinking, wrong agenda and doing the wrong
things. The issue that whole of humanity faces is how to change the wrong
thinking of the wrong people into positive thinking and rational human discipline articulating
basic human values of freedom, morality, compassion, equality, justice and
service to all.

Irony of the Ironies: Failure
of the 21st Century Global Institutions

All the global
organizations- the presumptuous claimant of representatives of the human ideal principles
and values, have failed miserably once again to bring the whole of humanity to
tragic man-made conflicts and consequential horrible impacts of the sophisticated
wars on human life and habitats. The same ideals embodied the making of the League
of the Nations- a first global experience in peacemaking and collective
security but its members led it to failure. The UN carried on another human
attempt to recover from the past mistakes and to usher hope for the remaining
humanity but the superpowers selfish aggrandizements made it impotent long
before it was supposed to be working for the good of the humanity. Individual
visions failed to materialize the collective goodness for all of the living
humanity. The deliberate destruction of human civilizations is well in
progress. The US led “War on Terrorism” devastated the impoverish humanity,
killing millions and millions and destroying their lives, businesses and
habitats just to satisfy the ferocious mindset of the few neo-conservatives
governed by George W. Bush, now a candidate for war crimes. So is the former
British PM Blair actively sought by the concerned global humanity for alleged
war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The office bearers of the UN responsible to save the humanity form scourge of
war and to foster global peace and security now turned out to be incompetent master
of lies and deception. They were all knowledgeable people and chosen to govern the
people-based liberal democracies but proved ignorant and arrogant to the human
principles of freedom and justice.

The Western
policy makers claim power (knowledge and material possessions) and have used it
to pave the ways for influence and hegemonic control over the rest of the
world. The Two World Wars and now the US-British led “war on terrorism” are the
outcome of that absurd thinking. The others less fortunate in knowledge and material
possessions (power) – the generally described Third World (not sure, who are
the club members of the First World and where is the 2nd World), a
connotation full of sarcastic formula and inhuman thought serves the interest
of the policy planning agenda in the superpowers chess board game.

E.H. Carr had
assigned the history as teaching-learning guide for the mankind - the very
essence ignored and denied by the global power brokers- the so called Five Power
gangsters pretending to be godfathers of the UN Security Council- a dormant and
functional debating circle irrelevant to the global affairs. The facts of human
life speak for themselves as the global institutions of collective security
have flunked under pretensions and counter-claims of concerns to serve the
interest of the humanity. The institutionalized one-track organizations do not
represent the humanity but hypothetically carved-up nation states of the
world-some legitimate some otherwise. The humanity does not sit at the UN.
NATO, the EU, NORAD and so many other titles and names that are composed of the
nation states, not of the living mankind. The paper-based names and legally incorporated
titles could easily be rescinded, changed and transferred as was the case with
the former USSR.
They are hardly a point of reference for the beleaguered humanity oppressed by
the powerful states. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and specie
nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the
humanity have and continue to do so at a global scale without being challenged
by any global establishments. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and
numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral and human values and progressive
agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just
that most advanced nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap
at the EH Carr precious thoughts of human history. When they see the end, it is
irreversible. Had Pharaoh a choice, he could have come out alive from Red Sea. Modern Pharaohs have failed to grasp the reality
of human history. George W. Bush, Cheney, Blair and so many others would never
acknowledge that there was something basically WRONG with their THINKING until
they see the tribunal for war crimes? You wonder, how almost 3 million human
beings have been killed in Iraq
and millions of them made homeless and forced to leave their habitats to seek
shelters in foreign lands and the same is going-on in Afghanistan and Pakistan - the blessings of the
wrong thinking of the few. The Christian led wars of Crusades have never ended
against the Muslim living in one humanity-one world. It has assumed the name of
American led Crusade of hi-tech weapons submerged in the waves of fear and
ferocity – the minds of the US
belligerents in which presently reason and mankind are entrapped.

So says Tony Keller,
quite aptly, in his report on one of the great travesties of justice in
our time (and that is a long, long list): the outrageous show trial of
Omar Khadr, a young Canadian who recently pleaded guilty to various
spurious "terrorism" charges after spending eight years in the maw of
the American gulag, since his capture in Afghanistan at the age of 15.

While America's attention was diverted by the witless (and
war-avoiding) blather of the recent election campaign, the Pentagon
prosecutors of the Peace Laureate in the White House were finishing
their persecution of the child soldier. Having wrung a false confession
to a non-existent charge from him in the early days of his captivity,
when he was seriously wounded, they finally hammered a guilty plea out
of him in a kangaroo court in which even an acquittal could have seen
him incarcerated for the rest of his life. Such is the justice of the
Laureate.

As Keller reports:

On the main charge, "murder in
violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist
in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in
combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against
the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that
confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under
conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan.
He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an
al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes,
shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just
before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American
troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole
that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly,
given all that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was
subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head
for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes
forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the
bathroom. His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the
teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S.
prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death …

Gilad Atzmon (Hebrew: גלעד עצמון‎, born June 9,
1963) is a jazz
musician, author and anti-Zionist activist who was born in Israel and
currently lives in London.

"Anti-Semite is an empty signifier, no one actually can be
an
Anti-Semite and this includes me of course. In short, you are either a
racist - which I am not - or have an ideological disagreement with
Zionism... which I have."

He was born a secular Israeli Jew in Tel Aviv, and trained at the
Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His service in the Israeli military
convinced him Israel had become a militarized state controlled by
religious extremists. In 1994, Atzmon emigrated from Israel to London,
where he studied philosophy. Atzmon is an anti-Zionist who critiques
Jewish identity issues and
supports the Palestinian Right of Return as well as the establishment of
a single state in Israel/Palestine. He is a signatory to the
"Palestinians are the Priority Petition" which states “full and
unconditional support of the Palestinian people is a condition sine qua
non for activists to adopt.

Indeed the Zionification of this Kingdom has left this country in a disastrous ethical limbo.

“Last year I took the first steps towards converting to Judaism; also last year, I abandoned my attempt”, says Burchill.

But I guess that Burchill didn’t really have to convert -- She is
obviously far more Jewish than anyone I can think of. Burchill can teach
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
what self-love is all about. She can teach Paul Wolfowitz, David
Aaronovitch and David Miliband what moral-interventionism stands for.
She can give Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a crash course
in Hasbara. Burchill can lecture Zionist slander operators on how to
spread venom.

But most significantly, she displays an astonishing command of Jewish humour. Burchill is indeed very funny.

Jewish humour is a pretty simple concept : it is based on
self-mockery mixed together with the absurd. Thus we have Woody Allen
presenting himself as an alpha male Schwarzenegger type, and through
self deprecation, Larry David would appear to challenge our tolerance of
the ultimate form of Jewish rudeness.

And then we have Julie Burchill presenting herself as a veteran Sex bomb – funny indeed.

All through the George W. Bush administration, Americans were fed a steady diet of fear, strategically orchestrated by Bush and Cheney to promote their political agenda. Americans were scared into supporting war. They were frightened into buying masking tape. They were jolted by elevated color codes. They were unnerved about flying on planes. And much much more...

For eight long years Bush and Cheney were masters of mania, preying on a nervous nation through well-timed machinations. What coincidence that terrorist threats would arise before elections and critical legislation. Even Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri would broadcast messages that helped push G.W.'s platform.

Using unjustified fear is an abuse of governance. Sadly for Los Angeles, Lee Baca, its Sheriff of twelve years who is running unopposed in this election, is employing the abusive fear tactic. Mere days before California's November 2nd election, whose ballot includes Proposition 19, which if passed, would regulate, control and tax marijuana, Sheriff Baca is using free broadcast media to strike fear in voters against the Proposition he vehemently opposes.

As Baca's luck would have it, Halloween arrives just two days before the November 2nd election. To frighten voters against Prop 19, Baca ordered his sheriffs to confiscate marijuana edibles from legal dispensaries and remove them from circulation so they're not distributed to trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Baca then used the confiscated edibles as part of his free anti-Prop 19 broadcast media blitz.

Are Baca's actions ethical - or even legal? Is it legal and ethical to confiscate vendor's merchandise and then use it as a vehicle for free media air time to push a political agenda - an obvious political agenda that the Sheriff refuses to admit?

Here's one of the videos showing the confiscated edibles and fear tactics Baca is using:

Ten days ago there was an incident of three boys in Huntington Beach, California, who were admitted to the hospital after ingesting marijuana cookies. The ingestion was accidental after a parent failed to put the cookies away. Of course that was a serious oversight, and thankfully the boys are okay.

This Third Edition of The Pakistan Decapitation Papers adds
my current writings to the Second Edition, divided into two epochs. The
material of the second edition is carried over into the latter half of
the book as vol. 1 for the period 2007 – 2009. The first half adds new
content from where the second edition had left off to the present, as
vol. 2 for the period 2009 – 2010.

Foreword 2010

As
bad as things are in Pakistan today, it will get far worse in the West.
The Letter to Muslims, Chapter 2 of vol. 2, examines this tortuous
aspect of our zeitgeist.

We
can still salvage Pakistan for its 200 million peoples despite all that
has transpired in this twisted War on Terror; despite all our traitors,
mercenaries, useful idiots, native informants, and house negroes
who have sold the public short; and despite the state of un-functioning
of the nation, without electricity, water, decent livelihood and
affordable living for the 98% of the majority, and a lawlessness that
would have been beyond imagination in the 1960s and 1970s when I grew up
in the carefree idyllic Pakistan.

One
cannot look at Pakistan in isolation on the Grand Chessboard. The world
conditions are rapidly percolating towards global governance to
culminate in world government. Pakistan has thus far been played for a
dumb-ass pawn with copious help from Pakistan’s military – the only real
power-base in Pakistan whose upper echelons since Pakistan’s
blood-drenched creation have been entirely beholden to its foreign
masters. It is now self-evident that Pakistan’s and Israel’s creation
were crafty ploys by the world superpowers who for the past hundred plus
years have only dreamed of global empire and world government. Islamic
Pakistan was to be the foil for Zionist Israel – both created in the
name of religion. One to be played up to culminate in the “Zion that will light up all the world”,
the other to be eventually destroyed after it had been calculatingly
harnessed to fertilize and birth-pang terror like a condom deliberately
pricked by the illicit concubine. What happens to used condoms? That’s
right! And to unwanted babies? Right again.

Given
Pakistan’s ‘used condom’ status, I mean en passant status on the Grand
Chessboard, what can Pakistanis realistically do about it? First of all,
Pakistanis can do absolutely nothing so long as they are ruled by
mercenaries, fools, and uncle toms. Unless that obstacle is
removed, there is no sense in day dreaming. I have no idea how to do
that – for, even the noble Prophet of Islam had to bow before the
tyrannical power of the mercenaries of his time who eventually succeeded
in killing his family and hijacking Islam to such a vile degree that
today, our mosques are full with apathetic worshippers seeking heaven’s
glory while God’s creation is made to live hell right here on earth.

All
I can humbly do, appropriate to my limited vision, experience, and
commonsense, is provide the forensic global analysis to explain what the
game is on the Grand Chessboard, identify where it’s headed, and to
coldly opine to my brethren among the remaining 2% population of
Pakistan who have turned Pakistan into the ‘used condom’ of the
hectoring hegemons: stop being spineless bastards, for Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned; nor Hell a fury like the plebes scorned.

The
time to affect change is now if not already way past. Fait accompli
mercilessly awaits right at the edge of the Rubicon after which humpty
dumpty cannot be stitched back together again.

The
simple truth about America's marijuana prohibition: any law that allows
the easy incarceration of any citizen any time those in power want to
do it is the ultimate enemy of democracy. With 800,000 annual arrests
over an herb used by tens of millions of Americans, it is the
cornerstone of a police state.

The newly energized movement to
end prohibition in California—home to more than 10% of the nation—is one
of the few healthy developments in this otherwise horrific election.

Part
of the battle has already been won. By all accounts the California
campaign has thrust the issue to a new level. The terms of repeal are
not perfect. But the acceptance of marijuana use has taken a giant leap
forward. When joints are openly lit and smoked on national television, it's clear that sooner rather than later, this travesty will fall.

The
California campaign has drawn the sides clearly. Demanding continued
prohibition first and foremost are the drug dealers who profit directly.
As Dan Okrent has shown in LAST CALL: THE RISE & FALL OF
PROHIBITION, organized crime booms around such bans.

I want to clarify just what I know to be true in the United States today and a little about my background. I recently posted an article on a large website that is read by many Democrats. In fact someone told me that I can’t back up what I say with facts, and that my articles are “drivel”. Let me tell you a little about myself.

First of all, even though I was against the Vietnam War I managed to stay in the Army for almost 21 years. I was heavily involved in the peace movement and let me tell you, the Army was aware of almost everything I did. Still, I retired but not at the rank I would have wanted to. I was a Democrat that was in love with the Kennedy brothers and Eugene McCarthy. I was a “liberal” Democrat, a term that has fallen out of favor in the last decade.

Throughout the Clinton years I was pretty happy with the government. I didn’t know, or wasn’t aware of what was taking place behind the scenes. I didn’t know for example, that he raided the social security trust fund to balance the budget. When Bush was elected and 9/11 came, I was appalled at the lead up to the War in Iraq. I awoke from my lethargy and became very anti-Bush and Cheney. I was convinced they were monsters. I still do.

When I looked into the propaganda that was going on, I noticed that there were also many Democrats jumping in line with Bush and Cheney. I saw very few people that showed any sense of rationality. I started writing about 2004 about how I felt on my blog. Eventually I got picked up by different websites. At the time I was politically naive to say the least, seeing things in black and white, right or wrong, good or bad. I became so frustrated with the do-nothing Democrats that I tried to start another political party, The Liberal Party of America. In less than a year, with no money, we had a beautiful eight page website, a platform, and we had members working in eight states. I was elated at the fervor of our members.

Then it came time to try and get ballot access. I quickly learned how things political work. There are but two games in town, the Democrats and the Republicans and I quickly learned that they work hand in hand with each other, regardless of what you read in the papers or watch on TV. They have both fixed the races in every state and make it almost impossible to get ballot access unless you have bottomless pockets. Some States call for over 600,000 signatures on petitions to get on the ballot and the way most parties get these signatures is by paying corporations that do this kind of work a dollar a pop. Do the math.

I wondered how the two parties came up with the money so I investigated. I stumbled on to The Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) and was educated in campaign finance. I saw that the corporations and financial sectors dominated the political landscape. For those people that believe Barack Obama financed his campaign with small donations from the “little people” think again. His major campaign donor was Goldman Sachs. so much for the “grassroots”.

China may be as heavily in debt as we are. It just has a different way of keeping its books -- which makes a high-profile political ad sponsored by Citizens Against Government Waste, a fiscally conservative think tank, particularly ironic. Set in a lecture hall in China in 2030, the controversial ad shows a Chinese professor lecturing on the fall of empires: Greece, Rome, Great Britain, the United States . . . .

"They all make the same mistakes," he says. "Turning their backs on the principles that made them great. America tried to spend and tax itself out of a great recession. Enormous so-called stimulus spending, massive changes to health care, government takeover of private industries, and crushing debt."

Of course, he says, because the Chinese owned the debt, they are now masters of the Americans. The students laugh. The ad concludes, "You can change the future. You have to."

“The ad has the Chinese official saying that America collapsed because, in the midst of a recession, it relied on (a) government stimulus spending, (b) big changes in its health care systems, and (c) public intervention in major industries -- all of which of course, have been crucial parts of China's (successful) anti-recession policy.”

That is one anomaly. Another is that China has managed to keep its debt remarkably low despite decades of massive government spending. According to the IMF, China’s cumulative gross debt is only about 22% of 2010 GDP, compared to a U.S. gross debt that is 94% of 2010 GDP.

Gilad Atzmon (Hebrew: גלעד עצמון‎, born June 9,
1963) is a jazz
musician, author and anti-Zionist activist who was born in Israel and
currently lives in London.

"Anti-Semite is an empty signifier, no one actually can be
an
Anti-Semite and this includes me of course. In short, you are either a
racist - which I am not - or have an ideological disagreement with
Zionism... which I have."

He was born a secular Israeli Jew in Tel Aviv, and trained at the
Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His service in the Israeli military
convinced him Israel had become a militarized state controlled by
religious extremists. In 1994, Atzmon emigrated from Israel to London,
where he studied philosophy. Atzmon is an anti-Zionist who critiques
Jewish identity issues and
supports the Palestinian Right of Return as well as the establishment of
a single state in Israel/Palestine. He is a signatory to the
"Palestinians are the Priority Petition" which states “full and
unconditional support of the Palestinian people is a condition sine qua
non for activists to adopt.

I
have spent the last ten years elaborating on Jewish national ideology
and tribal politics. During my journey of grasping what Zionism and
Israel stand for, I came to realize that it is actually the Jewish left
-- and Jewish Marxists in particular -- that provide us with an adequate
glimpse into contemporary Jewish identity, tribal supremacy, marginal
politics and tribalism.

‘Jewish left’ is basically an oxymoron. It is a contradiction in
terms, because ‘Jewishness’ is a tribal ideology, whilst ‘the left’ are
traditionally understood as aspiring to universalism.

On the face of it, the ‘Jewish left’ is, at least categorically, no
different from Israel or Zionism: after all, it is an attempt to form
yet another ‘Jews only political club’. And as far as the Palestinian
solidarity movement is concerned, its role is subject to a growing
debate -- For on the one hand, one can see the political benefit of
pointing at a very few ‘good Jews’, and emphasizing that there are Jews
who ‘oppose Zionism as Jews’. Yet on the other hand, however, accepting
the legitimacy of such a racially orientated political affair, is in
itself, an acceptance of yet another form, or manifestation of Zionism,
for Zionism claims that Jews are primarily Jewish, and had better operate politically as Jews(1).

To a certain extent then, it is clear that Jewish anti Zionism, is, in itself, still just another form of Zionism.

‘Jewish dissidence’ has two main roles: First, it attempts to depict and bolster a positive image of Jews in general (2).
Second, it is there to silence and obscure any attempts on the part of
the outsider to grasp the meaning of Jewish identity and Jewish politics
within the machinations of the Jewish state. It is also there to stop
elements in this movement from elaborating on the crucial role of Jewish
lobbying.

The Jewish Left is there then, to mute any possible criticism of
Jewish politics within the wider Left movements. It is there to stop
the Goyim from looking into Jewish affairs.

The reason our financial system has routinely gotten into trouble, with periodic waves of depression like the one we’re battling now, may be due to a flawed perception not just of the roles of banking and credit but of the nature of money itself. In our economic adolescence, we have regarded money as a “thing”—something independent of the relationship it facilitates. But today there is no gold or silver backing our money. Instead, it’s created by banks when they make loans (that includes Federal Reserve Notes or dollar bills, which are created by the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned banking corporation, and lent into the economy). Virtually all money today originates as credit, or debt, which is simply a legal agreement to pay in the future.

Money as Relationship

In an illuminating dissertation called “Toward a General Theory of Credit and Money” in The Review of Austrian Economics (vol. 14:4, pages 267-317, 2001), Mostafa Moini, Professor of Economics at Oklahoma City University, argues that money has never actually been a “commodity” or “thing.” It has always been merely a “relation,” a legal agreement, a credit/debit arrangement, an acknowledgment of a debt owed and a promise to repay.

The concept of money-as-a-commodity can be traced back to the use of precious metal coins. Gold is widely claimed to be the oldest and most stable currency known, but this is not actually true. Money did not begin with gold coins and evolve into a sophisticated accounting system. It began as an accounting system and evolved into the use of precious metal coins. Money as a “unit of account” (a tally of sums paid and owed) predated money as a “store of value” (a “commodity” or “thing”) by two millennia; the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted not just hundreds of years (as with some civilizations using gold) but thousands of years. Their bank-like ancient payment systems were public systems—operated by the government the way that courts, libraries and post offices are operated as public services today.

In the payment system of ancient Sumeria, goods were given a value in terms of weight and were measured in these units against each other. The unit of weight was the “shekel,” something that was not originally a coin but a standardized measure. She was the word for barley, suggesting the original unit of measure was a weight of grain. This was valued against other commodities by weight: So many shekels of wheat equaled so many cows equaled so many shekels of silver, etc. Prices of major commodities were fixed by the government; Hammurabi, Babylonian king and lawmaker, has detailed tables of these. Interest was also fixed and invariable, making economic life very predictable.

Grain was stored in granaries, which served as a form of “bank.” But grain was perishable, so silver eventually became the standard tally representing sums owed. A farmer could go to market and exchange his perishable goods for a weight of silver, and come back at his leisure to redeem this market credit in other goods as needed. But it was still simply a tally of a debt owed and a right to make good on it later. Eventually, silver tallies became wooden tallies became paper tallies became electronic tallies.

Rupert Murdoch’s recent speech before the ADL gathering at their dinner gala opened with this flattering observation, “You have championed equal treatment for all races and creeds.” What he omitted from that statement is the ADL’s treatment of the Palestinian people under Abraham Foxman, its national director, who “…uses high-mindedness and unfounded anti-Semitism hysteria as cover for backing Jewish supremacy and the right of Israelis over Arabs, including by occupation and belligerently enforced apartheid” (Steven Lendman, Socio-Economic History Blog). Murdoch omits a needed clause at the end of that statement: “except for the Palestinian people and their beliefs and their rights under international law.” Indeed, Lendman’s article refutes virtually every one of Murdoch’s claims, laying bare the truth behind Murdoch’s talk: see nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing against Israel or suffer the condemnation that comes with the label “Anti-Semite.”

“We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” intones Murdoch as he castigates all peoples as inherently discriminating against Jews everywhere. “Ongoing war against Jews” not “a rising tide of valid criticism against the Zionist controlled state of Israel with its current government’s defiance of the United Nations’ reports on crimes against humanity as published by the Goldstone Report, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, the HRC report on the attack on the Marmara in May, and most recently the UNHRC by Dr. Richard Falk, the UN Representative for the Palestinian people.” No, Murdoch euphemistically conjures up a “war” against Jews, a suffering, weak, victimized people at the mercy of the world’s hate.

oal powers America. But at what cost to the environment and human health? That's the question documentarian Peter Bull and the Center for Investigative Reporting attempt to tackle in the new documentary, Dirty Business: "Clean Coal" and the Battle for Our Energy Future (http://dirtybusinessthefilm.com/).

Coal has produced power in our country for over 100 years. It pulled us through the Industrial Revolution and has pumped electricity into the hearts of our cities, keeping us warm through winter and up and running throughout the day. It's also caused insurmountable death and destruction along the way, contributing more than its fair share to climate change, water pollution and worker fatalities. So how do we challenge such an entrenched part of our culture and start the process of reversing these trends? That's the big question. Dirty Business shows us the way out of our energy and climate conundrum; we just need the political will to buck the entrenched special interests of the status quo and get imaginative with new alternative solutions.

Recently I caught up with Peter Bull, who has worked as an investigative producer for the last two decades. We discussed his documentary, which will be rolled out for screenings in select cities starting this fall, in house parties and community screenings nationwide, and available as a DVD in late October at the film's Web site.

Joshua Frank: Can you talk a bit about why you wanted to make this film, what drew you to the topic of coal?

Peter Bull: This film grew out of another project I did with the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). That was a one-hour documentary for PBS/Frontline called Hot Politics, about the politics of global warming and investigated why the Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2 administrations all failed to take meaningful action on the greatest threat that humans have come up against. Now it looks as if the Obama administration is about to get added to the list.

That program focused on how scientists like James Hansen and politicians like Tim Wirth and Al Gore tried to sound the alarm and how legislation and U.S. involvement in the Kyoto Protocol was stymied by special interests, particularly the coal and oil lobby, which mounted an aggressive disinformation campaign casting doubt about the science of climate change and playing to the media's propensity for on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand reporting. That kind of reporting is valid when dealing with contentious political issues but has no business being applied to reporting on scientific issues. But with climate change, the result has been that 50 percent of the airtime is given to the less than 1 percent who profess to be skeptics, while the overwhelmingly vast international scientific consensus that man-made climate change not only is real, but accelerating at a dramatic rate.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to claim that the resumption of peace talks between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have thus far yielded nothing of value, at least not as far as settling the decades-long struggle.

For one, the media has paid the talks little attention, aside from the ceremonial coverage of the first round of talks in Washington on September 2. It barely noticed the following round in the Middle East nearly two weeks later. What did capture the media’s attention was US President Barack Obama’s attempt to minimize the damage he invited upon himself for merely pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue a partial moratorium on settlement building (about 11 months ago), and then to extend the settlement freeze.

The President of the United States has, expectedly, failed to persuade Israeli leaders to uphold such a basic prerequisite to ensuring a smooth sailing peace process. Its resumption signaled the return of American diplomacy to the Middle East. Its current problems and expected failure, unlike previous rounds of talks, could very much usher the end of American political adventurism in the region. If a president like Obama – who once enjoyed such a massive national and international mandate - could weaken before a rightwing Israeli prime minister, then why should others even try?

To save face - and postpone failure - Obama has reportedly promised Israel broad security and diplomatic guarantees. All he has asked for in return is the mere extension of the settlement moratorium of 60 days - enough to push his party through the November elections.

" Let's blame (Imad) Mughniyah for killing Hariri. He's dead so the investigative trail ends. Just say, 'We had no idea what he was doing'. No more tribunal. Everyone is happy. And as a sweetener we'll take Hezbollah off our Terrorism list."

- US undersecretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffrey Feltman to Hezbollah via the Saudi-Syrian, back channel on 10/22/10

"Do you think we're that stupid?"

-
Hezbollah (smelling a set-up) to Obama via the same channel 10/23/10

Beirut is abuzz this morning over some pretty bizarre events that have been unfolding the past few months concerning Hezbollah and the UN created International Tribunal for Lebanon, created in 2007 to bring to justice those involved in the Valentine Day 2005 assassination of then Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.
Another one occurred yesterday morning, 10/27/10, at 9:00 am at Dr. Iman Charara's street level private obstetrics and gynecology clinic, here in Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah south Beirut neighborhood which is still recovering from Israel's 33 days of carpet bombing in 2006 which destroyed pretty much everything including more than 250 homes, scores of businesses, and much of the infrastructure.

Some, but not all of the facts of this still unfolding episode are agreed upon. Two English speaking male investigators, two male security persons, and one female interpreter, all from the Special Tribunal for Lebanon arrived in Dahiyeh to speak with Dr. Charara. They asked for phone numbers and addresses of 17 of her patients for as far back as 2003. The STL had called on 10/22/10 to make an appointment, and after checking with the Lebanese Medicinal Association regarding privacy issues, Dr. Charara agreed. When she led the delegation into an adjoining office to consult with her secretary about researching her office files, according to Dr. Charara, "I was surprised by the large number of women who came shouting and cursing the investigators," she told this morning Beirut's Daily Star. Dr. Iman Charara told New TV that she does not know how the clash between the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) investigators and the women at her clinic erupted.